Once & Future Pen & Ink #1 Review

 

Writer: Kieron Gillen

Artist: Dan Mora

Letterer: Ed Dukeshire

Commentary: Dan Mora & Kieron Gillen

Cover Artists: Dan Mora & Andrew K Currey

Designer: Grace Park

Editors: Amanda LaFranco, Jon Moisan & Matt Gagnon

Special Thanks: Tamra Bonvillain

Publisher: Boom! Studios

Price: $6.99

Release Date: August 28, 2024

 

Archeologist Alan James proudly displays the results of his excavations inside a field tent in Cornwall. In his jubilation, Alan neglected to ask his guest her name. Nor did she say what university she represented. Then, three men enter the tent, and one carries a gun. Why such interest in a 6^th-century scabbard? And how might the artifact revive Great Britain’s fortunes? Let’s strap on our plate armor, climb onto our horses, charge into Once & Future Pen & Ink #1, and find out!

 

Story

As Britain’s fortunes wane, temperatures rise. At least, so says the news anchor of the evening news, mentioning that this is Britain's hottest summer on record. The other residents of the care home in Somerset want to watch The Great British Bake Off, but after learning of Alan's murder, Bridgette insists on hearing more. A nurse, overhearing Bridgette threaten her fellow residents with violence, suggests that she get an early night, as her grandson is visiting her tomorrow. Bridgette smiles and requests an evening walk before bed.

 

In a posh Bristol restaurant, Duncan is having a date from Hell. Sadly, this isn't unusual for him. He may be a respected history scholar and rugby player, but he gets nervous around women. Across the table, Rose glares at him after an attempt at pouring wine ends in disaster. Duncan offers to pay for the dry cleaning, but then he learns that his grandmother has wandered off and needs him to pick her up.

 

In Once & Future Pen & Ink #1, Duncan arrives at an isolated place in the woods. As he walks through the trees, he spies his grandmother using a crowbar to open a buried storage chamber. Like John Wick, Duncan helps her remove the lid from a buried cache of weapons. Some of the knives, swords, and guns look historic. Others look like they belong in fantasy novels. As Bridgette speaks offhandedly about killing vampires, Duncan is mystified. His grandmother always dismissed the supernatural as nonsense. But then, as Bridgette says, plenty of things that are real are nonsense.

 

Kieron Gillen’s story about secret histories and the truth behind England’s mythical heroes sparkles with humor and wit. Duncan has always been in awe of his grandmother, and their adventure in the woods demonstrates Bridgette’s tough-as-nails perspective. She planned for this day but hoped it would never come. Duncan thought he knew everything about his grandmother. What Duncan discovers this night rocks his understanding of the woman who raised him. Yet he cannot deny the evidence of his eyes. In Once & Future Pen & Ink #1, Duncan remains as flustered around his grandmother as with Rose. Yet when danger threatens, the history scholar rises to the challenge, even in the face of supernatural nonsense.

 

Art

Even though he unearthed his finds, when the hefty, bearded archeologist lifts the fabric, his eyes light up, and his mouth drops open. The woman with Emma Peel's poise and attire betrays little emotion as she stares at the decorated scabbard, pots, and knives. Her companions wear a cross pin on their black shirts or jackets. They regard the archeologist with grim expressions.

 

While the other residents watch the TV or chat with each other, Bridgette stares out the window as she rolls a cigarette paper filled with tobacco. Her grim expression doesn’t change as she hears the news anchor mention the murder and theft on the TV behind her. Duncan betrays shock while Rose regards him with a deadly glare. Duncan’s phone captures his expression on the dark screen beneath the white letters Gran’s Home. After pressing the phone to his ear, Duncan rises. Rose’s eyebrows rise, and her features soften in Once & Future Pen & Ink #1. Later, when Duncan gazes down at a box filled with swords, rifles, a box of silver bullets, and a bazooka-like weapon that Bridgette once used to hunt vampires, his jaw drops, and his eyes bulge.

 

Dan Mora etches facial features and fabric movement with short lines. He inks shadows and uses white to show highlights. Mora may not employ fifty shades of gray to color skin tone, clothing, and interior and outdoor features, but he imbues scenes with the reality of our world. Closeups without backgrounds are rare in this thirty-page story packed with panels and highly detailed art.

 

Ed Dukeshire fills dialogue balloons and narrative boxes with large, black uppercase letters that embolden for inflection, swell for raised voices, and rarely shrink. While no sound effects accompany gunfire or a frantic chase through the woods, Duncan's phone conjures dancing music notes. The small, lower-case commentary at the bottom of each page highlights the techniques Dan Mora sought to master, how panels establish characters, and how page layout influences story pace. The lively interplay between author and artist highlights the cultural differences that prompted Kieron Gillen to make his scripts more detailed and enhance the series’ themes with a subplot. 

 

Final Thoughts

When true believers steal and murder to fulfill an ancient prophesy, a university professor who thinks he knows everything and his retired vampire-killing grandmother join forces to stop them in Once & Future Pen & Ink #1.

 

Rating 9.8/10

 

To see the beast Duncan battles in Once & Future Pen & Ink #1 see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.

Review: The Wild Storm #1

The Wild Storm #1: Cover by Jon Davis-Hunt

 

In The Wild Storm #1, DC Comics architect and Wildstorm founder Jim Lee tasked veteran writer Warren Ellis to reinvent his beloved superhero universe for today's generation. 

 

From the first page, we know Warren Ellis has adopted a new sensibility. There's no hint of stylized superheroes. Instead, we find people adopting a pragmatic approach to protecting our world against the dangers that threaten it today.

 

It's an approach that's invaded big-budget Hollywood thrillers, and taken over TV police dramas.

It's dark, gritty, and very, very real. 

Still, like any good dramatist, Ellis finds ways to lighten such heavy themes. A little bit.

Along with a twenty-four hour news cycle, threats from criminals, terrorists, and nefarious organizations and governments never cease. Thus, our characters are always alert, always looking for where the enemy will strike next.

 

Even a supposedly off-duty Miles Craven, the director of the deep black government department known as International Operations, is always on the lookout. 

So is his husband Julian, who I expect we'll learn more about in later issues.

Jon Davis-Hunt's previous penciling and inking work impressed Warren Ellis with its "clean line, its modern feeling, his attention to acting and body language as well as his attention to detail and environment." Apparently, when Kieron Gillen showed him Hunt's work, Ellis' first reaction was, "That's my artist."

"And I was right, too," Ellis asserts in the interview in the back of The Wild Storm #1.

In that interview, Ellis said he wanted to look "at the conspiracy-theory landscape of today, so there was a lot of research on, for example, the current state of UFOlogy and the extraterrestrial hypothesis." He puts this to work immediately with an incredible transformation a young woman undergoes in this first of two incredibly detailed pages by Jon Davis-Hunt.

What if you saw a man falling out of a skyscraper? What if a woman standing beside you suddenly transformed into a flying, mechanized being? Wouldn't you wonder, just a little, if this person was really human?

 

On the other hand, rich technologist Jacob Marlowe comes across as all-too-human. You can see just how shaken he is, thanks to Hunt's penciling and inking, and Ivan Plascencia's coloring.

 

In The Wild Storm #1, there are no narration boxes or sound effects. Only two times does color invade a dialogue balloon. Still, letterer Simon Bowland has his work cut out for him with all the characters' interactions. 

If you prefer a wham-bang-boom five-minutes-and-its-over read, this comic definitely isn't for you!

Wildstorm Trade Paperback Volume 1

 

With Jon Davis-Hunt*, and presumably the rest of the creative team, Warren Ellis wrote four books (his words) in twenty-four issues. His first book, or graphic novel, features a stunning cover by Jim Lee and inker Scott Williams. In those first six issues, Ellis reintroduces such storied characters as Jacob Marlowe, Grifter, Voodoo, Zealot, Miles Craven, Michael Cray, and...that woman who turned into a flying mechanized person. I want to know more about all of them, don't you?

Congratulations to Warren Ellis, Jon Davis-Hunt, and the entire creative team on updating Jim Lee's wildly successful superhero universe for today's sensibilities!

Dragon Dave

*To see Jon Davis-Hunt's latest work, check out Valiant Comics' Shadowman #1, on sale today.

Adventures in Cake and Comics

Last weekend, my wife decided that she wanted an adventure. Not a sail-around-the-world-in-a-weekend type of adventure, just a fun outing that was totally unplanned, and could therefore reap unexpected delights. As we had slept in on our day off, we naturally took time for a leisurely breakfast before deciding exactly what to do with our day. Then, we set off for our adventure!

First event of the day: carting our empty cans and bottles the recycling yard. This was a place forty-five minutes away. We've gone other places, but like this one the best. It's next to a tool shop we used to frequent, back before a series of events forced my grandmother into the hospital, then to be watched over by family, then sent into a nursing home, and then, gradually, to drift away from us until...well, you know. Like any war, the fighting and unwillingness to compromise in my family altered or killed numerous aspects of our lives. One of those was our woodworking. Still, even if some parts of our lives are irretrievably destroyed, we're hoping to resurrect the woodworking. Although we entered with no plans to buy anything, we left the store with a wood-and-brass mortise gauge. A cool tool in my hot little hands, courtesy of the wad of cash burning a hole in my pockets. Either the stupidest decision of my life, or an investment in my future. Hopefully the latter.

Of all the culinary delights in life, one my wife and I enjoy are our visits to Panera Bread. I'm talking our local one--we'd never visited another. But we found another by the tool shop, and it proved superior, in every way, to our local. And the coffee cake, our favorite treat: a big hunk to share and to savor, before we resumed/continued our adventure. (Sorry, no cake photo).

Over lunch, we decided to visit two comic book shops up in Temecula and Murrieta. So even though it was early afternoon, we headed up that way. 

On a recent trip to a local store, I picked up several old Classics Illustrated issues. One was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. I brought this with us, and as my wife drove, I read the comic aloud. Printed in the 1970s, the artwork is crude by modern standards, but the story made pleasant reading, and my wife was able to glance at the occasional drawing. It made a pleasant interlude before we arrived at the first comic book shop.

Mostly we were just curious what these two stores had in their old, discounted stacks, but we were also hoping to pick up the variant cover for Rocket Raccoon Issue 8, drawn by Marvel colorist Justin Ponsor. Although we didn't find it, we found several missing issues in series we collect, and completed the four-part story "Hulk Vs. Iron Man," part of Marvel's major Original Sin event.

In "Hulk Vs. Iron Man," the Watcher's eye reveals many secrets and past events our heroes would rather not have faced. One of those involve the intertwined past of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. I've read through Issue 2 now, and as it's a complex story, I won't attempt to summarize it in this post. It's co-written by Mark Waid, who writes the current Indestructible Hulk series, and Kieron Gillen, who writes the current Iron Man series. I've really enjoyed Waid's intelligent take on the Bruce Banner/Hulk situation, and what I've read so far leaves me intrigued about Gillen's take on Tony Stark/Iron Man. I'm glad I found the missing issues, so I can finish this four-issue story.

For dinner, we decided to be equally indulgent, and stopped for dinner at Weinerschnitzel. We shared a healthy dinner of chili cheese hot dog, chili cheese burger, chili cheese fries, and for dessert, soft serve ice cream cones. (Hey, we can always eat our vegetables later, right?) Then it was time to head back to San Diego, our adventure completed.

Or at least, so we thought. As we drove down the I-15, we decided to stop in North County Fair mall, and see if we could find that variant cover issue for Rocket Raccoon #8. Sadly, just like every other store, they didn't have it in stock, so we decided to give in and purchase the issue with the regular cover, along with Issue #9, which had just arrived in stores.

This cover is fun, as you can see, and offers an accurate reflection of the series. My wife and I don't collect many ongoing series, but Skottie Young's irreverent and low-key writing have won us over. I especially enjoyed the first four issues, which formed a nice homage to the stories Bill Mantlo wrote about Rocket back in the 1980s. Since then, the artists have changed, and the stories have been less epic, but they've all been fun. The issues never sit around long before they get picked up and read. When the next issue comes out, we read the electronic version on our computers, to refresh our minds on the story, then go out to buy and read about Rocket's latest adventures. 

That night, for whatever reason, we didn't sleep all that well, so we got up early in the morning and went to the gym for a workout. Then we came home and went back to sleep for a few hours. When I woke up I found myself alone in bed, and a pleasant aroma permeating the house. I headed into the kitchen, where I found a coffee cake baking in the oven. (Sorry, no cake photo). Sometimes an adventure can reap unexpected rewards, and this usually proves the case of scrounging through discount comic boxes. In this case, I also had a cool-looking and potentially useful tool, some new stories to read, pleasant memories, cash left over, and best of all, homemade coffee cake to savor. Can you think of a more pleasant way to cap off an Adventure in Cake and Comics?

Dragon Dave